Anna Karenina eBook

“No, not the least!” Nikolay answered,
vexed at the question. “Tell him to send
me a doctor.”

Three more days of agony followed; the sick man was
still in the same condition. The sense of longing
for his death was felt by everyone now at the mere
sight of him, by the waiters and the hotel-keeper
and all the people staying in the hotel, and the doctor
and Marya Nikolaevna and Levin and Kitty. The
sick man alone did not express this feeling, but on
the contrary was furious at their not getting him
doctors, and went on taking medicine and talking of
life. Only at rare moments, when the opium gave
him an instant’s relief from the never-ceasing
pain, he would sometimes, half asleep, utter what
was ever more intense in his heart than in all the
others: “Oh, if it were only the end!”
or: “When will it be over?”

His sufferings, steadily growing more intense, did
their work and prepared him for death. There
was no position in which he was not in pain, there
was not a minute in which he was unconscious of it,
not a limb, not a part of his body that did not ache
and cause him agony. Even the memories, the
impressions, the thoughts of this body awakened in
him now the same aversion as the body itself.
The sight of other people, their remarks, his own
reminiscences, everything was for him a source of agony.
Those about him felt this, and instinctively did not
allow themselves to move freely, to talk, to express
their wishes before him. All his life was merged
in the one feeling of suffering and desire to be rid
of it.

There was evidently coming over him that revulsion
that would make him look upon death as the goal of
his desires, as happiness. Hitherto each individual
desire, aroused by suffering or privation, such as
hunger, fatigue, thirst, had been satisfied by some
bodily function giving pleasure. But now no physical
craving or suffering received relief, and the effort
to relieve them only caused fresh suffering.
And so all desires were merged in one—­the
desire to be rid of all his sufferings and their source,
the body. But he had no words to express this
desire of deliverance, and so he did not speak of
it, and from habit asked for the satisfaction of desires
which could not now be satisfied. “Turn
me over on the other side,” he would say, and
immediately after he would ask to be turned back again
as before. “Give me some broth.
Take away the broth. Talk of something:
why are you silent?” And directly they began
to talk he would close his eyes, and would show weariness,
indifference, and loathing.

On the tenth day from their arrival at the town, Kitty
was unwell. She suffered from headache and sickness,
and she could not get up all the morning.

The doctor opined that the indisposition arose from
fatigue and excitement, and prescribed rest.

After dinner, however, Kitty got up and went as usual
with her work to the sick man. He looked at
her sternly when she came in, and smiled contemptuously
when she said she had been unwell. That day he
was continually blowing his nose, and groaning piteously.